Boy thats a misleading title, but I do have a question and a thought on the subject.

The question: Does anyone have a clear plan on how to get within those first 3 listings that appear on the Google results page?

The thought: If I checked out the listing for a product before I uploaded a feed to Froogle, I would see the lowest price for that product and price my listing 1 penny lower. It seems to me that when a user sorts by price lowest to highest(who doesnt do that?) that my product listing would almost always be first. Any thoughts on that?

I remember one, not sure if it is still accurate (its possible things changed since then). Here is how I summed up a thread at SEO Chat:

The basic premise is that Froogle pulls from the top matches for the three price ranges. According to Syragon, this means that they are looking at the low, medium and high price brackets and pulling one from each bracket. The ones selected from each bracket are the ones that are froogle optimized.

So how do I conduct Froogle optimization?
Both Egol and Syragon from SEO Chat discuss what they have seen that works for their Web sites. Egol says, "If you submit a datafeed the content of your site does not factor into your ranking. Instead your ranking is determined by the content of your data feed. The title of your listing and the exact text of your item description are the important things." And Syragon adds, "They select a low, middle, and high range for the top 3. When I say low middle and high I mean price range. They pick the "best match" from these 3 ranges and display them in order of lowest price to highest price."

And Syragon adds, "They select a low, middle, and high range for the top 3. When I say low middle and high I mean price range. They pick the "best match" from these 3 ranges and display them in order of lowest price to highest price."from 02/20/04

Hi Barry:

With regard to 'low' and 'high,' are these ranges or is it the lowest and highest. In other words, would you be likely one of the 3 selected if you had the lowest or highest priced product for a given search term match?

Every since Google became less timid about promoting and finally a link on their homepage to Froogle, I've seen very pleasing results. For online merchants like myself, its the best deal in town (free). I think its popularity will continue to grow and it would be great to have a tool to analyze this stuff, rather than guessing.

Thanks for the help. If anyone else wants to chime in before I begin this project, let me know. This thread will make for the project specification and I hope to start it today. Of course you can beta test, once we have something ready. I do not think it is a major project, maybe a day or two of full time work for one programmer.

Do you mean by the top 3 Google results, the organic results and not the Froogle results in google.com?

Because the Froogle results in google.com are the top 3 in Froogle.com for that keyword match.

But in that case, it might be interesting to see the top 20 organic results in google.com, possibly also the sponsored listings.

Do you mean by the top 3 Google results, the organic results and not the Froogle results in google.com?

Because the Froogle results in google.com are the top 3 in Froogle.com for that keyword match.

But in that case, it might be interesting to see the top 20 organic results in google.com, possibly also the sponsored listings.

Sorry if that was unclear, Barry. I meant the top 3 Froogle results that gets displayed at Google.com (like in my 'cookware' example). Basically, as your program is displaying its Froogle results, it would be interesting to see which of those made it over to Google (top 3 non-organic) and which ones didn't.

Another thing that I'm not sure yet if it takes into play, but since my ecommerce retail company is a Yahoo! Store and they have been feeding our listings to Froogle ever since it started, I'm not sure if there is any boost in the algo as to the feed comes from a trusted source?

We also have our RSS/XML feed listed on the footer to all out pages as well.

Right now, I believe we appear well for many of our products, so perhaps you might like to test our feed. I will send you a link through a PM.